Literature in South Africa Stimulating, entertaining and insightful Literature in South Africa South African literature is as diverse as the country and includes science fiction, magical realism, crime writing, comedy, social realism, reportage and cultural commentary. Two South African writers have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Nadine Gordimer (1991) and JM Coetzee (2003). Did you know? South Africa's best-selling author is Wilbur Smith. South African literature is rich, diverse and increasingly robust with writers receiving acclaim for works of science fiction, magical realism, crime writing, comedy, social realism, reportage and cultural commentary. One of South Africa’s first writers to receive international recognition is Olive Schreiner. Her semi-autobiographical novel Story of an African Farm was published in 1883. Schreiner was a passionate advocate of feminism, pacifism and free thought. Laurens van der Post, born in the Free State in 1906, is another famous early South African writer. His works include Venture into the Interior, Flamingo Feather and The Lost World of the Kalahari, in which he documented aspects of San culture.

Alan Paton's novel Cry, the Beloved Country, published in 1948, became an international literary classic, whilst Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom is a contemporary classic of non-fiction. Cattle rancher Stuart Cloete found popular success as a writer with adventure stories such as Turning Wheels, a novel of the Great Trek, as did Wilbur Smith, a contemporary bestselling international novelist. Poet Roy Campbell, with his South African literary works such as The Flaming Terrapin, The Wayzgoose and Flowering Rifle, is another significant South African author. Athol Fugard is among South Africa’s greatest dramatists and his plays continue to be performed worldwide. Sol Plaatje was a pioneering black writer whose works such as Native Life and Mhudi have become classics. He is also known for his translations of Shakespeare into Setswana. Two South African writers have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Nadine Gordimer (1991) and J M Coetzee (2003). Gordimer also won the Booker Prize, while Coetzee was the first writer to win the Booker Prize twice.

Among our contemporary literary stars, you will find André Brink, Achmat Dangor, Damon Galgut, Zakes Mda, Njabulo Ndebele, Marlene van Niekerk and Zoë Wicomb. Younger writers like Imraan Coovadia, Kopano Matlwa, Niq Mhlongo and crime fiction writer Deon Meyer, are increasingly popular and several significant Afrikaans authors like Eben Venter, Ingrid Winterbach and Etienne van Heerden are available in English translation. Travel Nadine Gordimer and the South African Experience Nadine Gordimer and the South African Experience by Per Wästberg * Warrior of the Imagination Nadine Gordimer, born in 1923 and, in Seamus Heaney 's words, one of "the guerrillas of the imagination," became the first South African and the seventh woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. Over half a century, Gordimer has written thirteen novels, over two hundred short stories, and several volumes of essays. Ten books are devoted to her works, and about two hundred critical essays appear in her bibliography. Few living authors have kept so many academics occupied.

The best study, in my view, is Stephen Clingman's The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside (London: Bloomsbury, 1993). Gordimer's works have been translated into more than thirty languages. She herself has been awarded fifteen honorary doctorates and received major literary prizes. And she has given much personal support to individual writers. Geiger Counter of Apartheid Through the years, visitors have come to her house to inform, plead, and confess. She has been so deeply involved in the anti-apartheid struggle that one wonders how she managed to keep her integrity and observe South African society with such a discerning eye in her stories. In spite of her taking part in demonstrations, giving speeches, and travelling around the world supporting good causes, Gordimer is intensely private and guards her study, staying there through the mornings up to a late lunch. She does not make friends easily, says her oldest friend Anthony Sampson, but when she does she often retains them for life. Nadine Gordimer with Anthony Sampson in Johannesburg in the 1980s.

Photo: Nadine Gordimer's private archive Gordimer endured the bleak decades, refusing to move abroad as so many others did. Her husband, Reinhold Cassirer, is a refugee from Nazi Germany, who served in the British Army in World War II. Her daughter settled in France, her son in New York; but she kept her lines open inside South Africa, out of commitment to black liberation and also for the sake of her own creativity and that of black South African writers who were silenced, for whom she had to speak. Gordimer's Nobel Prize put the searchlight on a country in painful transition from an oppressive racism to a turbulent democracy. South Africa's literature is rich. But beyond doubt, Nadine Gordimer is the writer that most stubbornly has kept the true face of racism in front of us, in all its human complexities. For fifty years, Gordimer has been the Geiger counter of apartheid and of the movements of people across the crust of South Africa. Her work reflects the psychic vibrations within that country, the road from passivity and blindness to resistance and struggle, the forbidden friendships, the censored soul, and the underground networks.

She has outlined a free zone where it was possible to try out, in imagination, what life beyond apartheid might be like. She wrote as if censorship did not exist and as if there were readers willing to listen. In her characters, the major currents of contemporary history intersect. Gordimer has created individuals who make their moral choices behind private doors and in the public sphere. She has painted a social background subtler than anything presented by political scientists, thus providing an insight into the roots of the struggle and the mechanisms of change that no historian could have matched. Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress Early in her career, before other white writers, Gordimer saw the inventive buoyancy and playful courage of Sophiatown's and Soweto's black intellectuals and politicians, the circles where the young Nelson Mandela moved. Nadine's best friend, Bettie du Toit, was arrested in 1960, the year of Sharpeville, and so the political struggle entered her life. When Mandela and his colleagues were on trial for their lives, she became a close friend of their defence lawyers, Bram Fischer (the subject of Burger's Daughter) and George Bizos.

Indeed, her proudest day, she says, was not when she was awarded the Nobel Prize (of which she gave a portion to the South African Congress of Writers) but when she testified at the Delmas trial in 1986, to save the lives of twenty-two ANC members, all of them accused of treason. When Mandela was freed, Nadine Gordimer was one of the first he wished to see. "Strange to live in a country where there are still heroes." (Burger's Daughter) Asked what she would write about when apartheid was over, Gordimer replied, "Life didn't end with apartheid; new life began." With her novels of the mid-1990's, None to Accompany Me and The House Gun, Gordimer proved that there is literary life after apartheid. In fact, her imagination was unbound; her books catch the social ambiguities of her time. She has not suffered the fate of some of her East European colleagues. In the Transkei 1980. Photo: David Golblatt.

Nadine Gordimer's private archive Race and Gender The writer's task is to transform experience, to enter into the existence of others, whether they be black or white, men or women, and to use the tension in both participating and standing at the side. With her restless energy and prodigious discipline, Gordimer is able to put herself not only in the mind, but also in the body of criminal and saint, male or female, black or white. She herself contains many persons in one body: she grew up speaking English in the African mining town of Springs, was a Jewish girl in a Catholic convent school, and then was educated at home. Lonely, with a domineering mother, she wrote from an early age and published her first adult story at 15. Her father was a Jewish watchmaker from the border between Latvia and Lithuania. He opened a jeweller's shop in Springs in Transvaal and sold trophy cups to shooting clubs, as well as engagement rings. He read nothing. Her mother, a transplanted Londoner, read aloud to her daughters. Troubled by the way blacks were treated, she founded a crèche, a nursery school for black children.

Gordimer's father, on the other hand, to avoid being conspicuous, turned a blind eye to any reminder of the oppression he had himself been subjected to in czarist Russia. This is the world of The Lying Days. Without the library in her small town, Nadine may not have become a writer; she was well aware that blacks were not permitted to use the local library. Nadine Gordimer wearing an Arab necklace, 1953. Photo: Leon Levson. Nadine Gordimer's private archive The Novel as History Her first published volume appeared in 1949, the short-story collection Face to Face. The Lying Days, published in 1953, is about waking up from the naivete of a small colonial town. Gordimer wrote of "having a picnic in a beautiful cemetery where people were buried alive." South Africa is seen as a whites-only annex of European society, with middle-class suburbs, Sunday outings, and a blindness about anything lurking below the surface. The vast black population is regarded as if it was there only to serve whites in industry and at home. With her son Hugo, at home in Johannesburg about 1960. Photo: Hans Knopf.

Nadine Gordimer's private archive "The novel as history is something other than a historical novel," Nadine Gordimer has remarked. Her protagonists and their points of view are constantly shifting. It may be Hillela, the sexual rebel, amoral and intuitive, demolishing apartheid in her personal sphere; or Bray in A Guest of Honour, a good man, a fragile liberal, betrayed by the old empire that found him too radical and by the new that tramples him down in passing. Through the novels, Gordimer's historical consciousness grows. In A World of Strangers (1958), we find the dilemma of well-meaning liberalism, while in Occasion for Loving (1963), it is the insight of the humanist that apartheid cannot be reformed by pious words. The Late Bourgeois World (1966) reflects Nelson Mandela's decision to switch from passive resistance to sabotage. Gordimer joined the ANC before it was legal to do so and was impatient with whites who accused the ANC of autocratic tendencies instead of influencing it by joining. She has herself been both loyal and critical, all the time safeguarding the integrity of her imagination.

Her inspiration, rather than her cause for despair, are the dangerous but rewarding contradictions of South African society today. Love and Politics When I first met Nadine Gordimer in early 1959, she had just published A World of Strangers and moved from the exploration of her upbringing in The Lying Days (1953) to her first attempt to focus on the growing anti-apartheid movement and the multiracialism of the Drum set of Can Themba, Lewis Nkosi, and others. Her third novel, Occasion for Loving (1963) deals with the failure of tolerance and humanism; the increasing absurdity of the race laws brought friendship and love across the colour bar to a halt. In her fourth novel, The Late Bourgeois World (1966), the choice is between the naive idealism of saboteurs or the well-meaning cynicism of passive liberals. In 1971, Gordimer published A Guest of Honour, a huge novel about the birth pangs of the new Africa. Individual history and great ideological perspectives are woven into a chronicle whose protagonists embody the social, political, and moral problems arising when a victorious liberation front splits up into factions.

Idealism and good will are almost drowned by a new brutality and a corruption similar to that under colonial rule. It deals with policy formulation and backroom bargaining and uses trade union jargon, local language transposed into English, settler ironies, and nationalist slogans. It is a Henry Jamesian enterprise where society and marriage, politics and landscapes, mix without obscuring the pattern. With husband Reinhold Cassirer, 1969-70. Nadine Gordimer's private archive The Conservationist, which won the Booker Prize for 1974, evokes the sterility of the white community. This novel is a kind of sequel to the first classic of South African literature, Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883), which can also be said of another remarkable novel centered on a farm, J M Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country (1977). Mehring, the Afrikaner antihero whose farm is as barren as his life, conserves both nature and the apartheid system, the one to keep the other at bay. He likes to preserve nature's variety but is in fact its exploiter; nor does nature return his sentimental love.

In his moral vacuum, Mehring sees Africa returning to the possession of the blacks. Gordimer's powerful landscape descriptions become metaphors of the soul. Using Zulu creation myths, she looks in a new way at nature in South Africa, leaving her white predecessors in art and literature behind. The Conservationist is a novel of ironies. Mehring is not a male chauvinist Boer; he is tolerant but no liberal, a financier using his farm as a tax-deductible expense. His leftist mistress travels round the world on his money. He likes to be seen as a country gentleman, but sexually he is a colonialist as we see when he picks up a coloured girl and takes her to an old mine property, only to be surprised by the mine guards. The corpse of an unknown African is found on the farm, silently disputing Mehring's claim to his own clean soil. He identifies with the nameless black man under the reeds, burying him in a coffin. Yet the corpse haunting Mehring and his house (a symbol of South Africa) is the claim on Africa by those who possess no land at all. The Conservationist is Gordimer's densest and most poetical novel.

Its minute details and documentary precision form an intricate web of meanings where each stone, egg, and piece of marble carry symbolic implications. Here, as in July's People, Gordimer finds a fertile blend of narrative interest, rich language, and high moral seriousness, as well as rounded characters. She avoids explanations and leaves the reader free to interpret. A Dialogue with the Future Burger's Daughter (1979) is, in her own words, "a coded homage" to Bram Fischer, the communist lawyer who was sentenced to life in prison and whose name nobody was allowed to mention. Gordimer never claimed to portray him - although his daughter recognised their lives - but to convey the hidden truth behind a public person. The challenge to the writer is to penetrate official lies and facades, to see beyond and behind, with an intuition and insight unhampered by social conventions or family discretion.

She intended, she said, "to bring to a broad canvas the position of the white Left in South Africa, and the extraordinary dynasty of belief and struggle in these families." Two of her major works, July's People (1981) and My Son's Story (1990), deal, on several symbolic levels, with individual fates and the terrible choices forced upon people by an inhuman ideology. In the latter, Gordimer catches both the unexpected moment when the revolutionary spark ignites and the daily routine when internal dissension rocks the upper reaches of the anti-apartheid movement. The novel's central character, a mixed race man named Sonny, is trapped between being a teacher and a politician, a father and a husband. About to enter a political collective struggle, he is caught between one state and another to come; he is himself the transition. Through him, and others, Gordimer enters into a dialogue with the future, with the absent forces that are to rule our lives in years ahead. Gordimer reveals situations when reality suddenly takes another course and we are caught in our roles and expectations, in the traps of skin colour, class, family, and the body itself.

She is drawn to those who try to escape from the trap: What makes the suburban housewife become an underground agent, the lawyer to sacrifice his life for a future not his, the young architect to hide a black freedom fighter? How do faithfulness and betrayal interact in an erotic and political context? July's People are Maureen and Bamford Smales, he an architect, she a housewife and former dancer, with three children, a nice suburban house, and a servant named July. It is a parable of the future: the servant hides his master's family to protect them from catastrophe. July has been their "boy" for fifteen years, and "his people" are his educated, good, white South African employers, as well as his own people, his black family and villagers deep in the country. In July's People, Gordimer portrays a future bloody South African revolution, which happily never took place. Instead there was the free election of 1994, the country narrowly drawing back from the brink of civil war. Having stayed with Nadine Gordimer and her husband for several weeks at that time, I remember the joy, the laughter, and the hunger to see all and hear all of the miracles around us.

"To have lived to see the end coming, and to have had some tiny part in it has been extraordinary and wonderful," she said in 1994. "It's like birth. As the baby's head is moulded by its passage down the birth canal so in South Africa your head, your mentality, your spirit, [are] forced into strange shapes by those extraordinary laws." A Sport of Nature (1987) is Gordimer's most hazardous undertaking. Like A Guest of Honour, it is novel as history. Hillela runs off from an idyllic childhood to prove her sexuality and dive into the mess of the world's variety. Gordimer's empathy and affection are again with the blacks. It is a Cinderella tale summing up Africa's postcolonial history. Hillela is a despised daughter who enters palaces and presidencies through her political and sexual alliances. She marries an unscrupulous West African politician who becomes president of an African country and so attends the installation of the first South African black president (a thinly disguised Nelson Mandela).

The finale is a vision of the future, but the focus is on Hillela as an honoured guest of a country where she was once a rebellious little white nobody. With Hillela, the intelligent, sensual heroine of a political picaresque, "Gordimer has met a fictional character she almost entirely loves," says her biographer Stephen Clingman. Gordimer took political and literary risks in this brutal fairy-tale of the dreadful year 1987, but she was right in predicting that liberation was only a few years away. The Search for Identity Nadine Gordimer's great themes are love and politics. Behind the most intimate relations, as well as the most public, there is the same search for an identity, a self-confirmation, and a wish to belong and exist. For Gordimer, the novel and the short story are instruments to penetrate a society that defends itself against scrutiny, hides in censorship and hypocrisy, refuses to recognise its history, and thus produces a grammar of lies where capitalism, liberalism, and Marxism mean the same thing: an onslaught on the volk. She enters people's most intimate regions to show how private life is violated by informers and race registers.

To write from within the personal sphere and make it public is the contrary to the police method of crashing into houses to confiscate letters and diaries, an act the teenaged Gordimer herself witnessed when the police raided a servant's room in her family's house. Nadine Gordimer with Morakabe Seakhoa (left) receiving an award from an association of African women (in the 1990s). Nadine Gordimer's private archive Her characters live in the shadow of violence, threatened by unpredictable brutality. Races and classes, conventions and codes ferment in a decoction of final showdowns and a mysteriously glimmering hope of unexpected mergers and elective affinities outlined in the sands of the future. Through her language and fearless characterisation, Gordimer became a counterweight to the regime's propaganda. Unsentimental and diagnostic, she reports from the heart of darkness. In a country that for so long feared new thoughts and orientations, Gordimer has scraped away the many layers of prejudice and egoism; she has dug out the fragile roots of a common fate and made us glimpse the brilliant colours of a world untainted by apartheid.

Characters Her novel The House Gun (1998) is a morally complex, moving story from the liberated South Africa. A white murderer may now be defended by a black lawyer; in fact, it is this highly educated black man on whom two intelligent, well-read parents depend for the survival and sanity of their souls and for the redefinition of meaning in their lives. Their son has killed a man he loves, out of jealousy. Natalie, the mistress who is the impetus for the murder, is self-destructive and rebels against every form of personal dependence. It is a fable of violence and the search for new forms of freedom; it is also courtroom reportage. Had not the house gun been around, as it generally is in white families, no murder would have happened. This, in turn, evokes reflection on the fact of the general rise of violence in the world. The gun bought like any commodity in many countries – in the United States, Great Britain, France, or Japan – serves domestic violence and often falls into the hands of a child, with tragic consequences.

Gordimer's style and perspective, more complex in the two latest novels, reflect on her words about the writer's dialectic: the tension between "excessive preoccupation and identification with the lives of others" and a "monstrous detachment." The House Gun has a definite voice of its own. Like The Conservationist, it stands stylistically apart from many of her other works. Who is the subject of this tragedy? Where are our edges? Where do the boundaries of self overlap, making each one responsible for the other's reality in a time of swift flux? Gordimer is not afraid to present women of extraordinary intelligence and utmost delicacy of feeling as well as their vulgar counterparts. Take the human rights lawyer, Vera Stark, in None to Accompany Me. She is tormented by her husband Bennet's love, which remains the same without taking in what has happened around them. Vera wants someone who is committed to matters she thinks are important. She finds in work a defiant independence, which earlier she has experienced in her erotic life. Her foremost responsibility is with the liberation struggle and with her own sense of self. Becoming free, Vera locks herself out from most of what other people want their freedom for.

In the end, she persuades herself that only without Bennet can she become a genuine human being. She suffers pangs of conscience because, in his uninvolved innocence, he cannot understand her rebellion. It is the solitariness – none to accompany me – in the midst of her community activism and her work for victims of persecution that is the paradox of Vera's life. She is looking for a combat-free zone on a battlefield. In her comradeship with those who are risking their lives, Vera gets closer to her black colleagues than she does to her husband. Gordimer's strength, here and elsewhere, is that she confronts bold and dangerous questions and gives them form without offering a ready answer. How can one keep one's hands clean while working against a dirty regime that does not shrink from using any means at its disposal? Does freedom consist in losing the past bit by bit? Why is there always someone who cannot afford to remember and others who are incapable of forgetting, however much they want to? Receiving the 'Premio Malaparte' from Alberto Moravia in Capri, Italy, 1985.

Nadine Gordimer's private archive The Truth of Fiction Nadine Gordimer has never written an autobiography or produced testimonies. She works in the imaginative dimension, always on an expedition into the mysteries of human experience. She does not appear "armed and dangerous," as her friend Ronnie Kasrils, one-time terrorist, later cabinet minister, was described by the police as late as 1992; but, in fact, she is, for hardly anyone has so vividly alerted the world to how apartheid undermined relations between people and made innocence criminal. "Nothing I say in essays and articles will be as true as my fiction," she stated in an interview in Transition (no. 56, 1992). Because fiction is a disguise, it can "encompass all the things that go unsaid among other people and in yourself... There is always, subconsciously, some kind of self-censorship in nonfiction." She added that, in a certain sense, a writer is selected by her subject, which is the consciousness of her own era. Today, Nadine Gordimer lives and writes in a half-formed society of a kind almost never before seen on earth.

Black and white have agreed to bring about a multiracial democracy by their faith as much as by their work. But the present stems from the past, and apartheid's contempt for human life now expresses itself in street killings, gang massacres, and armed robbery. Gordimer's territory has always been the border between private emotions and external forces. There are no neutral zones where people can rest unobserved. In a land of lies, everyone lives a double life. Only love, the erotic dimension, stands for a sort of liberty, the glimpse of a more truthful existence. Outside the lovers' chamber, there is a society, greedy, immoral where empathy and responsibility for others, whatever skin colour, are rare. Thus, every meeting becomes instrumental or absurd. In many of her stories, Gordimer reminds us that the future of South Africa is not only a question of votes for all but one that requires immense effort to create a civil spirit, allowing people to look each other in the eye. The responsibility of love and the loss of understanding, the loss of a grip on the world that comes with the end of love, are central themes in all of Gordimer's books. She is a moralist of a kind Alfred Nobel would have approved.

She finds an uncommitted life not worth living. Her revolutionaries or human rights lawyers may have agonising personal problems, but they do not give up. In her later novels, there are people with energy and vision, as well as those who see nothing clearly – the former women, the latter often men. Gordimer seems to keep her characters at a distance in order to maintain a sense of the unknowable. Then one may discover, as André Brink says, "that one's very attempt at understanding or confronting the mystery opens up spaces of awareness one has not suspected before." Her true concerns reach beyond issues of the time to test the limits of human relationships and of language itself. The Writer's Mission Thanks to Nadine's and Reinhold's hospitality and our friendship of more than forty years, I have stayed in their house, built around 1910, longer than in anyone's house. It has hardly changed; I know every corner of it – her books, the paintings and the African handicraft she and Reinhold have collected over the years, the smells, the way to move in the kitchen and in the garden. The house is like the childhood retreat where I spent my summer holidays.

A tree planted just before I visited the house for the first time is now huge. The police has never raided the house, although she has hidden some ANC fighters during a national alert for their seizure. Per Wästberg (left), Reinhold Cassirer and Nadine Gordimer. Copyright © Per Wästberg 1995 In her Nobel Lecture , Nadine Gordimer warned that an author risks both the state's condemnation as a traitor and the freedom movement's complaint that he or she fails to demonstrate blind loyalty. But, she explained, "the author serves humanity only as long as he utilises the word against his own loyalties too." Thus, a key paragraph in her book of Harvard lectures, Writing and Being (1994, p 130) is this: Only through a writer's explorations could I have begun to discover the human dynamism of the place I was born to and the time it was to be enacted. Only in the prescient dimension of the imagination could I bring together what had been deliberately broken and fragmented; fit together the shapes of living experience, my own and that of others, without which a whole consciousness is not attainable.

I had to be part of the transformation of my place in order for it to know me. Nadine Gordimer's work has grown into a profoundly psychological and social chronicle of half a century in South Africa. She is both its archivist and lighthouse keeper. Above her collected experience, the light sweeps, illuminating parts that would otherwise have lain in darkness, helping us navigate towards a South Africa that, far from being geographically cut off and politically ostracised, depicts a universal landscape. Every effort has been made by the editors to credit organizations and individuals with regard to the supply of photographs and illustrations. The publishers apologize for any omissions which will be corrected as soon as proper information has been given to us. * Per Wästberg was born in Stockholm in 1933. He received his Bachelor of Arts (comparative literature) from Harvard University in 1955 and PhD from Uppsala University in 1962 on a thesis of the African novel, 1945-60. He has been a critic and columnist at Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's main daily, since 1953.

1976-82, he was Chief Editor of the same paper. He is Vice President of International PEN, and was President of Swedish PEN, 1967-78. He founded the Swedish Amnesty in 1963. He is a member of the European Academy of Arts & Sciences since 1980 and became member of The Swedish Academy, chair no 12, in 1997. He is a member of the Nobel Committee for Literature since 1998. Per Wästberg has published fifty books, novels, poetry and non-fiction. He made his debut as a 15-year old with a collection of short stories, Boy with Soap Bubbles (Pojke med såpbubblor) 1949. His breakthrough came in 1955 with the novel Half of the Kingdom (Halva kungariket). His encounter with oppression and racism in Africa and the Third World is documented in Forbidden Territory (Förbjudet område), 1960, followed by On the Black List (På svarta listan), reportage, journal and political analysis on Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and South Africa.

The books were printed in altogether one million copies in nine languages. It led to the author being prohibited from entering Rhodesia until its independence in 1980 and from South Africa until Nelson Mandela's release in 1990. First published 26 April 2001 Share this: To cite this page MLA style: "Nadine Gordimer and the South African Experience". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. Web. 19 Jan 2017. < SA writer, Nadine Gordimer, wins Nobel Prize for Literature | South African History Online South African History Online Home » SA writer, Nadine Gordimer, wins Nobel Prize for Literature SA writer, Nadine Gordimer, wins Nobel Prize for Literature Nadine Gordimer Saturday, 7 December 1991 South African writer Nadine Gordimer won the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature . She was the first woman in 25 years to be awarded the honour and the seventh woman laureate in the near-century history of the Nobel Prize.

Gordimer is the author of ten novels and more than 200 short stories; her work over the past forty years has insistently and increasingly focused upon the legacies and moral consequences of apartheid. Heralded as well as banned in her native country, Gordimer has consistently refused to leave South Africa. By addressing its political and racial turmoil in her fiction, she has chosen a spiritual exile over an actual one. In announcing its selection to the press, the Academy praised Gordimer for her magnificent epic writing, her compassion and her outstanding literary style. References: • nobelprize, Nadine Gordimer's biography from the Nobel Prize's official website [online], available at: , [accessed 27 September 2013] In 1991, South African writer Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel Prize for literature her first story was published when she was fifteen years old. a. Fragment b. Run-on c. Correct You have new items in your feed. Click to view. Question and answer In 1991, South African writer Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel Prize for literature her first story was published when she was fifteen years old. a. Fragment b. Run-on c.

Correct The sentence above is B. Run-on sentence Get an answer In 1991, South African writer Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel Prize for literature her first story was published when she was fifteen years old. a. Fragment b. Run-on c. Correct Original conversation User: In 1991, South African writer Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel Prize for literature her first story was published when she was fifteen years old. a. Fragment b. Run-on c. Correct Weegy: The sentence above is B. Run-on sentence MrG |Points 5639| User: Watching television shows, one after another, hour after hour, some young people forget their responsibilities. a. Fragment b. Run-on c. Correct Weegy: Watching television shows, one after another, hour after hour, some young people forget their responsibilities. The answer is a. Fragment. jerry06 |Points 1060| User: Lasagna, a baked dish, usually consists of layers of boiled lasagna pasta, tomato sauce, cheese, and meat lasagna can also be made with spinach instead of meat. a. Fragment b. Run-on c.

Correct Weegy: Lasagna, a baked dish, usually consists of layers of boiled lasagna pasta, tomato sauce, cheese, and meat lasagna can also be made with spinach instead of meat. b. Run-on. [smile] Mayang30 |Points 1303| User: Watching television shows, one after another, hour after hour, some young people forget their responsibilities. a. Fragment b. Run-on c. Correct Weegy: Watching television shows, one after another, hour after hour, some young people forget their responsibilities. The answer is a. Fragment. jerry06 |Points 1060| User: Peter J. McGuire helped to found the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, he originally suggested the idea of a Labor Day it was first celebrated in New York on September 5, 1882. Weegy: Peter J. McGuire helped to found the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, he originally suggested the idea of a Labor Day it was first celebrated in New York on September 5, 1882. [ - This is a Run-on sentence.

] Expert answered| emdjay23 |Points 3108| Celebrating Africa’s Nobel Prize Winners You are here: Home / News Roundup / Celebrating Africa’s Nobel Prize Winners Celebrating Africa’s Nobel Prize Winners October 5, 2010 By Daniel Musiitwa 2 Comments Soyinka, Gordimer and Coetzee This week, the winners of the 2010 Nobel Prize in various fields are being announced. Winners will walk away with a medal, personal diploma, and a cash award of approximately $1.5 million each. The awards founded by Alfred Nobel, a Swedish inventor and entrepreneur honor “men and women from all corners of the globe for outstanding achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and for work in peace.” Over the years, Africa has had its fair share of award recipients, notably Nelson Mandela and Frederik Willem de Klerk who were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 2003. Former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan won the prize in 2001, while Kenyan environmental activist Wangari Maathai received the award in 2004.

Other prominent Africans who have won this prestigious award include Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1984) and Albert Sisulu (1960). But for book lovers around the world, the prize to watch is the Nobel Prize for Literature, which is due to be announced on Thursday, October 7, 2010. Algerian writer Assia Djebar and Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o are rumoured to be among the nominees for what is one of the richest prizes in the literary field. Whatever the outcome, this is a great opportunity to salute Africa’s past winners of the Award. In all, Africa has had four recipients of the Nobel Literature Prize. Wole Soyinka Born in 1934, Nigerian playwright and political activist Wole Soyinka received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, thus becoming the first African to ever win this prestigious prize.

He was recognized for “applying a wide cultural perspective and poetic overtones to fashions the drama of existence” Naguib Mahfouz Mahfouz, who died in 2006 was an Egyptian writer, awarded the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature for ” works rich in nuance – now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous” that have ” formed an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind”. He is regarded as one of the first contemporary writers of Arabic literature. Over a career that span 70 years, he published more than 50 novels, over 350 short stories, dozens of movie scripts, and five plays. Many of his works have been made into Egyptian and foreign films. Nadine Gordimer Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991 in recognition of her epic writing, which in the words of Alfred Nobel, “has been of very great benefit to humanity” Born in 1923 in Springs, South Africa, Gordimer has lived all her life in South Africa.

John Maxwell Coetzee Coetzee, another South African is the most recent African winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature having received the prize in 2003. He was recognized as a writer “who in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider”. As we mark another year of the Nobels, we would like to salute these great Africans for championing the voice of African literature on the global stage. __________________________________ Have you enjoyed reading a book by one of Africa’s prize winning writers? Why not share a review on . Send your review to the Africa Book Club at reviews@africabookclub.com 2011 Editor’s Note: Two other Africans received the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded jointly to three women – Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee, and Tawakul Karman of Yemen. They were recognised for their “non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work”. Gordimer - definition of Gordimer by The Free Dictionary Gordimer - definition of Gordimer by The Free Dictionary Also found in: Thesaurus , Encyclopedia , Wikipedia .

Gor·di·mer (gôr′də-mər), Nadine 1923-2014. South African writer whose works, such as July's People (1981), often address the racial tensions of her homeland. She won the 1991 Nobel Prize for literature. Gordimer (ˈɡɔːdɪmə) n (Biography) Nadine. born 1923, South African novelist. Her books include The Lying Days (1952), The Conservationist (1974), which won the Booker prize, None to Accompany Me (1994), and The House Gun (1998). Her works were banned in South Africa for their condemnation of apartheid. Nobel prize for literature 1991 Gor•di•mer Nadine, born 1923, South African writer: Nobel prize 1991. ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend: Noun 1. Gordimer - South African novelist and short-story writer whose work describes the effects of apartheid (born in 1923) Want to thank TFD for its existence?

Tell a friend about us , add a link to this page, or visit the webmaster's page for free fun content . Link to this page: Lies References in periodicals archive ? The execution of the project documentation and technical specifications for the implementation and Acceptance of construction works (STWiORB), together with cost estimation for investors to revitalize the House of John Paul II, 6, along with Nadine Gordimer and yard management (plot no 846/41). Nobel laureate Gunter Grass dies at 87 Like Gordimer, Brink had been among the few particularly distinguished white South African writers whose denunciation of white privilege and enunciation of enlightened humane values potentially applicable to all humankind did not only become the presiding concern of their art but was also expressed in their "heretical" association with the ANC (that is, rather than the National Party or better still the Broederbond). Andre Brink: in defiance of boundaries In other words, he was truly, inevitably made of the stuff that marked Balzac, Gordimer, Tolstoy or Naguib Mahfouz as the best in the global family of authors, recounting obsessively about the human condition just as how Kemal committed his life to.

Nadine Gordimer - Facts Nadine Gordimer The Nobel Prize in Literature 1991 Nadine Gordimer Born: 20 November 1923, Springs, South Africa Died: 13 July 2014, Johannesburg, South Africa Residence at the time of the award: South Africa Prize motivation: "who through her magnificent epic writing has - in the words of Alfred Nobel - been of very great benefit to humanity" Field: prose Prize share: 1/1 Life Nadine Gordimer was born in Springs, South Africa. Her parents were Jewish immigrants; her father was from Latvia and her mother was from England. Nadine began writing at the age of nine, and was just 15 years old when her first work was published. The novel entitled The Conservationist (1974) gave her international breakthrough. Nadine Gordimer was involved in the anti-apartheid movement early on and several of her books were banned by the apartheid regime. She has lived and worked in Johannesburg, South Africa, since 1948. Work Nadine Gordimer's works include novels, short stories, and essays.

During the 1960s and 1970s she wrote a number of novels set against the backdrop of the emerging resistance movement against apartheid, while the liberated South Africa provides the backdrop for her later works, written in the 1990s. The stories of individuals are always at the center of her narratives, in relation to external limitations and frameworks. As a whole, Nadine Gordimer's literary works create rich imagery of South Africa's historical development. Share this: Writer Nadine Gordimer Captured Apartheid's Contradictions : NPR Writer Nadine Gordimer Captured Apartheid's Contradictions Embed Embed Writer Nadine Gordimer Captured Apartheid's Contradictions Writer Nadine Gordimer Captured Apartheid's Contradictions Embed Embed In addition to her 15 novels, Nadine Gordimer authored several volumes of short stories and nonfiction. Radu Sigheti/Reuters /Landov hide caption toggle caption Radu Sigheti/Reuters /Landov In addition to her 15 novels, Nadine Gordimer authored several volumes of short stories and nonfiction.

Radu Sigheti/Reuters /Landov South African writer Nadine Gordimer, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1991, died Sunday at the age of 90. Gordimer merged the personal and political to create a compelling portrait of the injustice of life under apartheid. She was born in 1923 to a mother whose family came to South Africa from Britain and a Jewish father who had lived under oppression in his native Lithuania. But she didn't learn her politics at home; rather, as she moved out into the wider world — first at university in Johannesburg — she took in what was happening in her country under the government-mandated system of apartheid. Neville Hoad, an English professor at the University of Texas, Austin, first read Gordimer when he was a university student in South Africa. "She traveled in social circles in Johannesburg that were very much politically engaged," he says. "But I also think she was an astute observer of, you know, everyday experience in Johannesburg in those years.

And if you were paying attention, you couldn't help but notice the injustices of apartheid." Article continues after sponsorship Gordimer's first novel, 1953's The Lying Days , is the story of a young woman who, like Gordimer, comes from a small mining town and begins grappling with apartheid when she has an affair with a social worker. Gordimer, who wrote 15 novels, continued to explore the effects of apartheid in books like A World of Strangers, The Conservationist and A Sport of Nature. A passage from that last book, told from the heroine's perspective, reads: "At night I sat out in what the darkness reverted to the miner's garden. ... The frogs throbbing on and the sea hissing. I'd walk down to the beach. Nothing. Nothing but gentleness, you know how the Indian Ocean seems to evaporate into the sky at night. In the middle of my witness of the horror of this country, I experienced the white man's peace. I did." Hoad says her ability to capture the contradictions of daily life in South Africa is what made her work so crucial.

"She's the most important South African writer of the 20th century for explaining to the English-speaking world what life under apartheid was like." Gordimer, Mazwai Remember Nelson Mandela Gordimer, Mazwai Remember Nelson Mandela Embed Embed 'Present': For Nadine Gordimer, Politics Hit Home Farrar, Straus and Giroux's Jonathon Galassi has been Gordimer's U.S. publisher since the late 1980s. He says, "The thing that's most remarkable about Nadine as a writer was her honesty. She wasn't trying to present a political platform, but she was reflecting in her work what she sensed. She drew from what she knew firsthand and she transformed it. That's what fiction does. But it was very accurate. Her radar for human politics was super acute." As astute as her political observations were, Galassi says, Gordimer's real genius was her insight into the way people interact with one another. "She will go down in history as a great writer about human relations — race, sex, politics, class. And I think she'll be read forever," he says.

In announcing her death, Gordimer's family said she "cared most deeply about South Africa, its culture, its people, and its ongoing struggle to realize its new democracy."

Question: Which South African writer won the Novel Prize for Literature in 1991?
Answer: NADINE GORDIMER